Monthly Archives: October 2013

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We spy on our enemies, and we spy on our friends. We plan interventions in enemy territories and have plans on file, and up-date them frequently, to intervene (not invade) friendly lands who get into, our definition of, trouble. Our enemies spy on us, as do our friends. No one in an embassy or consulate has an expectation of privacy. There are probably competing bugs in every room—half planted by other nations and half by us to monitor our own staffs. This is our dirty big non-secret.

The great sin is not spying but getting caught. It is particularly egregious if you get caught so compromised that your nation can’t deny you and your activities. Though in the current spy crisis (Spygate?) our administration is trying hard to deny that President Obama knew anything about spying on world leaders. This is a terrible denial because if he didn’t know it would be hugely irresponsible and if he did know, it’s both a silly policy and a silly lie. Obama is in a no-win situation here.

Congress wastes no time in setting about to waste time. They are holding partisan hearings. But this is kind of futile because the spying certainly precedes Obama and is likely to get to George W, to Clinton and to George H W Bush, who was, you might remember, the head of the CIA. Hmmm?

What makes the present investigation almost risible is calling the head of the NSA to testify. You’ll remember that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a self-admitted perjurer who denied under oath before Congress that the NSA gathered massive data on American civilians. He explained when caught the he “said the least untrue thing I could.” Since no charges resulted from that, it is difficult to judge the potential value of any further testimony on the subject of spying.

In spying, getting caught is the sin, and it answers the age-old question “If a spy spies in a forest and is not seen, did he spy?” No! The greater question is the value of our promiscuous information gathering versus the risk of exposure and humiliation. Getting caught on Angela Merkel’s phone is not good. But monitoring, even for so-called “meta-data,” 60 million French phone calls in one month is just futile. The insult is not worth the result.

We are collecting far more data than we can usefully analyze. All the answers may be in the haystack but if we can’t find them, what’s the use? The great case in point is the Boston Marathon Bombing. We had it all. And yes, dots are always easy to connect post facto. Still, with a heads-up from Russia as to the specific suspects, and recording of phone conversations between Massachusetts and Dagestan, we still didn’t stop the bombing. Why? We had too many leads, too many phone calls and not enough people or programs for translating, contextualizing and prioritizing the information.

You can monitor every phone call in the Middle East but if we don’t have the Arabic speakers and translators for every dialect it’s mostly gibberish. If we can’t translate and decode people speaking a mixture of Dagestan argot along with American colloquialisms and Kazakh patois we only have a data storm. Even 60 million French phone calls in a month may elude intelligent and coherent analysis.

We seem to have blundered into peace in Syria and are working on a rapprochement with Iran. However, peace has a price and that seems to be fear, suspicion and criticism from two of our closest allies in the region—and for the moment, two uncomfortable allies with each other: Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The good news is that, for the moment, they are speaking in one voice. The bad news is that they’re actually yelling in one voice and that is their condemnation of our policies towards both Syria and Iran. They preferred our policies of threats, confrontation and preparations for war(s).

For both Saudi Arabia and Israel, Iran is a great and existential threat. Both believe that Iran is only buying time while it builds a nuclear arsenal. America backing off of our “red line” reduces their confidence that we’ll follow through and prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability. Though neither nation feels terribly threatened by Syria, both believed that American credibility was on the line, and we failed them and emboldened Iran.

Nearly everyone understands that Israel doesn’t have a useful part to play in Syria. For them it would be bad if either the insurgent Salafis/Jihadis win or if Assad gains an outright victory extending Iran’s influence in the region. But many are puzzled that Saudi Arabia keeps pleading for our firm action with both Assad and the Iranian Mullahs. They wonder why, given all the military armaments we’ve sold them, they don’t just take care of things themselves? They wonder why the Saudis would even encourage Israel to take on Iran? These are good questions, but for once, they have pretty easy answers.

The Saudis are rich. They are well armed with American jets, rockets, guns and tanks. They are also well educated in their officer class. So why don’t they do it themselves? The good news is (and truly this is not a criticism) that they are risk averse. If they can off-shore or subcontract their fighting and dying, they will. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, they asked us to come into their land and defend them while we liberated Kuwait. This, by the way, is the cause around which Osama bin Laden organized his enmity. He hated Western, mostly Christian, boots on his holy ground.

Bin Laden is gone but Saudi desire for others to defend their interests still persists. They are sincerely angered that we can’t be relied upon to kill and die for them. They are not crazy in wanting to farm out the violence. War with Iran would be terrible. Nor is a nuclear Iran a happy prospect for anyone.

Some may look at the Tea Party folks as “wacko birds” (Sen. John McCain’s words). They may see them at the far right of the Republican Party, but let’s look a little closer at their lineage and particularly their paternity.

The spiritual father of the Tea Party was probably Sen. Strom Thurmond, the presidential candidate of the Dixiecrats in 1948. This was a conservative branch of Southern Democrats who could not abide integration, were therefore passionately anti-civil rights and for state’s rights. They attempted to legally justify ignoring federal law with the doctrines of “interposition” and “nullification.” Both were legal theories that would allow individual states, or states acting together, to declare a federal law unconstitutional. Our courts have, at every level, ruled that these are invalid theories. Yet they remain spoken desires. Texas Gov. Perry, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, threatened secession. Many of his persuasion want the ability to opt out of federal mandates and laws. The Affordable Health Care Act is a prime example.

The “Solid South,” that once belonged to the Democrats, began, with the Dixiecrat rebellion, to melt away. After Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the Solid South became the Reliably Republican South. It’s been observed by some pundits (I’m using the passive voice here to convey their opinion without endorsing it) that the Tea Party is strongest in the states of the old Confederacy and is animated, if not by racial animus, by a philosophy that delegitimizes the Federal Government. It’s disproportionately white and believes that their government and their country has been stolen from them. In my view it hasn’t been stolen, but it is changing and that is threatening.

Demographically the members of the Tea Party are not rural uneducated rabble. Rebels yes. Their leader, Sen. Cruz, also of Texas, may be ethnically Cuban by way of Canadian birth, he may be a graduate of Harvard and Princeton but nonetheless He’s a stereotypic southern “good old boy.” He’s in the populist mold of Huey Long and plays, whether sincerely or cynically, on the grievances of folks who feel their privileged place slipping away.

There are many reasons to be offended and even outraged this week. The optics of World War II veterans being shut out of visiting their own memorial is only one. Yet worse is the terrible fact that immediate death benefits weren’t paid to the families of the 26 soldiers killed and returned to Dover Air Force Base, and there was no money to fly them up to meet the flag-draped coffins.

There’s ample cause for bipartisan outrage. Some bureaucrat’s choice to punish our veterans and the families of those who died serving our nation is more than appalling. It’s stupid, cruel and heartless. However, maybe there’s something to be gained from this. If nothing else, the shutdown draws our attention back to the bodies that have been arriving in anonymity.

However horrifying this insult is, it is not the worst scandal. The true indecency is that 26 of our men and women have died in our service since October the first. We have let the sacrifice of our young slide off the headlines in our papers and on the Internet. The cost in blood, in pain and the loss of husbands, wives and children have drifted from our focus. As a society we’ve taken our eyes, hearts and minds off of the terrible and futile misspending of the lives of our precious children.

Our men and women continue to fight and die in Afghanistan. We are withdrawing slowly. Why slowly? It’s all over—except the killing and dying. We can claim that we won because we got Osama bin Laden. Or we can admit that we lost because we created no democratic institutions and the Taliban are resurgent. However we pitch it, we are leaving. Why tarry? The Taliban know we’re going. Those who were once friendly to us, and even hopeful that we’d make a difference, know we won’t be there to protect them.

When the Chairman of the Board of PBS West becomes Director of Communications for the Bullet Train, how could this not create the appearance of a conflict of interest? I’m sure that the new Director and PBS board chair, Robert Magnuson, is a fine fellow, a good citizen and the model of fairness and integrity. Yet, when a someone, anyone, has the job of promoting an expensive, controversial and deeply politically wounded project and, at the same time, chairs the board of the stations people in power look to, we have a troubling model.

The train project is in deep trouble with public support falling faster than its projected price is rising. Without a clear rout down the Peninsula near San Francisco, an agreed path through the central valley or a decision about how it will cross the Tehachapi’s, we have little reason for confidence. With the first segment a short run between two cow towns (and the train won’t carry cows), it’s hard to imagine a road to economic sustainability.

There are controversies about the speed of the train, its noise, and environmental impact—on both people and cows. No, really. Milk farmers are worried the noise will have a deleterious effect on milk production. There are controversies about who will build the actual trains. The project is beset by woes and so the public needs to ask questions and be informed.